That night I went to my bedroom and pulled open the top of an old-fashioned desk standing in the corner. Except for this desk there was not another unnecessary piece of furniture in the apartment, for I like a cell-like place to sleep. I consider that fresh air and a clear conscience ought to be the chief adjuncts—for a cluttered-up, luxurious bedroom always reminds me of Camille—and tuberculosis.
"And all this fuss about a few little faded wisps of paper!"
I sat down before the desk, after I had loosed my hair—which is that very, very black, that is the Hibernian accompaniment to blue eyes—and had slipped my slippers on.
"You have put me to considerable trouble to-day, Lady Frances."
Her portrait was hanging there—a small, cabinet-sized picture, in a battered gold frame. Her lover had succeeded in making her face on canvas very beautiful—with the exaggerated beauty of eyes and mouth which all portraits of that period show. Her brow was fine and thoughtful, irradiating the face with intelligence, yet I never looked at her without having a feeling that I was infinitely wiser than she.
Isn't it queer that we have this feeling of superiority over the people in old portraits—just because they are dead and we are living? We open an ancient book of engravings, and say: "Poor little Mary Shelley! Simple little Jane Austen! Naughty little Nell Gwynne!"—There's only one pictured lady of my acquaintance who smiles down my latter-day wisdom as being a futile upstart thing. I can't pity her! Oh, no! Nor endure her either, for she's Mona Lisa!
I had always had this maternal protectiveness in my attitude toward Lady Frances Webb, and to-night it was so keen that I could have tucked her in bed and told her fairy tales to soothe away the trembling fright she must have endured all that day. Instead of doing this, however, I satisfied myself with reading some of the letters over again. Isn't it a pity that above every writing-desk devoted to inter-sex correspondence there is not a framed warning: "Beyond Platonic Friendship Lies—Alimony!"
Anyway, Lady Frances and James Christie tried the medium ground for a while. Over in a large pigeonhole, far away from the rest, was a packet of letters tied with a strong twine. They were the uninteresting ones, because they weremuzzled. The handwriting was the same as that of the others—dainty, last-century chirography, as delicate and curling as a baby's pink fingers—but I never read them, for I don't care for muzzled things. Gossip about Lady Jersey—MarlboroughHouse—the cold-blooded ire of William Lamb—all this held but little charm—compared with the other.
"Not you—not to-night," I decided, pushing them aside quickly. "I've got to have good pay for my pains of this day!"
I sought another compartment, where a batch huddled together—a carefully selected batch. They were as many, and as clinging in their contact with one another, as early kisses. I took up the first one.
"Dear Big Man"—it began.
"It has been weeks and weeks now since I have seen you! If it were not that you lived in that terrible London and I in this lonely country, I should be too proud to remind you of the time, for I should expect you to be the one to complain.
"Surely it is because of this that I now hate London so! It keeps this knowledge of separation—this sense of dreary waiting—from burning into your heart, as it does into mine!
"There you are kept too busy to think—but here I can do nothing else!—Or perhaps I am quite wrong, and it is not a matter of London and Lancashire, after all, but the more primal one of your being a man, and my being a woman!DoI love the more? I wonder? And yet, I don't think that I care much! I am willing to love more abjectly than any woman ever loved before—if you care for me just a little in return."
(I always feltverywise and maternal at this point.)
"You were an awful goose, Lady Frances!" I said. "This is a mistake thatIhave never made!"
"Still, I am tormented by thoughts of you in London," the letter kept on. "I think of you—there—as a lion. It presses down upon me, this recollection that you are James Christie, the great artist, and the only release from the torture is when I go alone into the library and sit down before the fire. The two chairs are there—those two that were there that day—and then I can forgetabout the lion. 'Jim—Jim!' I whisper—'just mylover!'
"Then your face comes—it has to come, or I could never be good! Your rugged face that speaks of great forests which have been your home—the fierce young freedom which has nurtured you—and the glorious uplift you have achieved above all that is small and weak!
"You have asked me a thousand times why I love you, but I have never known what to say—because I love you for so many things—until now, when I have nothing but memories—and the ever-present sight of your absent face. And now I don't know why I love you, but I know what I love best about you. Shall I tell you—though of course you know already! It is not your talent—wonderful as it is—for there have been other artists; nor your terrible charm with its power to lure women away from duty—for England is full of fascinating men; nor your sweetness—and I think the first time I saw you smile I sounded the depths of this—it is not anyof these, dear heart! Not any of these! I love best the strength of you which you use to control the charm—the untamed force of your personality which makes your talent seem just an incident—and the big,bigvirility of you!
"Do you think for a moment that you look like an artist? Half-civilized you? Why, you are a woodsman, dear love—but not a hunter! You could never kill living things for the joy of seeing them die!
"You look as if you had spent all your life in the woods, doing hard tasks patiently—a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner! Ah, a charcoal burner! A man who has had to grip life with bared hands and wrest his bread from grudging circumstances. This is what you are, Jim, to my heart's eyes. You are a primal creature—simple-souled, great-bodied, and your mind is given over to naked truth.
"But all the time you are a famous artist—and London's idol! Your studio in St. James's Street is the lounging-place for curled darlings!The hardest task that your hands perform is over the ugly features of a fat duchess!—How can you, Jim? Why don't you come away? You are a man first, an artist afterward—and it is the man that I love!
"And, Jim,doyou know how much I love you? Do you know how your face leads me on?—It is your face I must have now, darling.Portrait of the Artist, by Himself, is a title I have often smiled over, wondering how a man could be induced to paint his own features, but now I know! It is always because some woman has so clamorously demanded it—a woman who loved him! What else can so entirely satisfy—and when will you send it to me?"
When I came to the end I was sorry, for I had such a way of getting en rapport with her sentiments that I eyed the next express wagon I passed, eagerly, to see if it could possibly be bringing thePortrait of the Artist, by Himself!
And on this occasion I reread a portion of the letter.
"Your face—your rugged face—or I could never be good!"
The picture of a rugged face was haunting me, and after a moment a sudden thought came to me.
"Why, that's whatIshould like!"
I had the grace to feel ashamed, of course, especially as I recalled how mother and Guilford had tormented me that afternoon to know why I wouldn't marry—and I found the answer in this sudden discovery. Still, that didn't keep me from pursuing the subject.
"A rugged face—great forests—fierce freedom—glorious uplift!—Oh, Man! Man! Where are you—and where is your great forest?—That's exactly what I want!"
I turned back to the desk, after a while, and still allowing my mind to circle away from the business at hand somewhat, I drew out another letter. It was short—and troubled. The dear, little, lady-like writing ran off at a tangent.
"Yes, I have seen the picture! Next toMurillo'sBetrothal of St. Catherine,—the face is the loveliest thing I have ever seen on canvas.
"Of course it is idealized—yet so absurdlylikethat they tell me all Mayfair is staring! This talk—this stirring-up of what has been sleeping—will make it a thousand times harder for us ever to see each other, yet I am glad you did it!
"They are saying—Mayfair—that your 'making a pageant of a bleeding heart' is as indelicate as Caroline Lamb'sGlenarvon! If people are going to be in love wickedly at least they ought not to write books about it—nor paint pictures of it!... Oh, beloved, let us pray that we may always keep bitterness out of our portraits of each other!"
The letter burned my fingers, for the pen marks were quick and jagged—like electric sparks—and I felt the pain that had sent them out; so I turned back to others of the batch—others that I knew almost by heart, yet always found something new in.
"I don't know that it's such an enviable state,after all, this being in love," I mused. "It seems to me it consists of—quite a mixture! But, of course, it will take Heaven itself to solve the problem of a thornless rose!"
I ran my finger over the edges of the improvised envelopes, heavily sealed and bearing complicated foreign stamping. There were dozens of them—many only the common garden variety of love-letters, long-drawn out, confidential, reminiscent or hopeful, as the case might be—and a few which sounded at times almost light-hearted.
"When I say that I think of you all the time I am not so original as my critics give me credit for being, dear heart," she wrote in one. "Nothing else in the annals of love-making is so trite as this, but when I explain how persistently your image is before me, how intricately woven with every thought of the future—how inseparably linked with every vision of happiness—you will know that mine is no light nor passing attachment.
"If I give you one foolish example of this will it bore you? I've written you before, I believe, that this spring I have been outdoors all the time—riding or driving about the country, because the mad restlessness of thinking about you drives me out. In this house, in these gardens,youare so constantly present that I can do nothing but remember—then I go away, hoping to forget—and what happens?—I go into a castle—a place where you have never been, perhaps—and before I can begin talking with any one, or think of any sensible thing to say the thought comes to me: 'How well the figure of my lover would fit in with all this grandeur! How naturally and easily he would swing through these great rooms!'
"Then, early some mornings I ride into the village—past cottages that look so humble and happy that I feel my heart stifling with longing to possess one of them—andyou! 'How happy I could be living there,' I think, 'but—how tremendously tall and stalwart Jim would lookcoming in through this low doorway, as I called him to supper!'
"Then I spend hours and hours planning the real home I want us to have, dear love of mine. I don't care much whether it is a castle or a cottage, just so it has you in it—and all around it must be the sight of distant hills! These foryourartist's soul!
"You and a hundred distant hills, Jim! Then days—and nights, and nights and days—and summers and winters of joy!
"Some time this will come to pass—it must—and we shall call it heaven! And we shall rejoice that we were strong to keep the faith through the days of trial and longing so that we could reach it and be worthy of it.
"And, when this shall come, I can never know fear again—fear that London will make you cease to love me—that some other woman may gain possession of you—that the artist in you may crush out and starve the lover. There willbe but one thought of fear then, and that will be that you may die and leave me, but this will not be hopeless, for I too can die!
"Oh, do you remember that first day—that wonderful, anguished, bewildering first day—then that night when I kissed you? When I think of sickening fear I always remember that time. Two weeks before the London newspapers had chronicled your visit to Colmere Abbey 'to paint the portrait of the novelist, Lady Frances Webb,' but you were deceiving the newspapers, for you had lost your power to paint!
"It was quite early in the morning of that eighth or ninth day of blessed dalliance, when the canvas still showed itself accusingly bare, that you threw down your brush and declared you were going back to London, 'because—because Colmere Abbey had robbed your hands of their power.'
"And what did I do when you told me this terrible thing? I said, wickedly and withoutshame, 'Would you go away and leave me all alone in idleness?'
"'Idleness?' you repeated, pretending not to understand.
"'Neither can I do any work—since you came to Colmere!'
"You stood quite still beside the easel for a breathless moment, then:
"'DoI—keepyou—from working?' you asked.
"Your face tried to look sorry and amazed, but the triumph showed through and glorified your dear eyes.
"'Then certainly I must go away—at once—to-day,' you kept on, but you came straight across the room and placed your hands upon my shoulders. 'Just this once—just one time, sweetheart, then I'll go straight away and never see you again!'
"And that night, true to your promise, you did go away, but I followed you to the gates—andwhen I saw horses ready saddled there to take you away from me, the high resolves I had made came fluttering to earth. I put my hands up to your face and kissed you. During all the giddy joy of that day's confessional I had kept from doing this, but—not when I saw you leaving!
"'I wish that this kiss could mark your cheek—and let all the world know that you are mine,' I whispered, shivering against you in that first madness of fear over losing you.
"'You've made a mark!' you laughed fondly. 'A mark that I shall carry all the days of my life.'
"But I was still fearful.
"'You may know that you are marked, but how will the world—how will other women know that you are mine?'
"'The world shall know it,' you declared, brushing back my hair and kissing me again. 'There will never be another woman in my life—and some day, when I can paint your portrait, it will certainly know then. To me you are so very beautiful.'"
Another letter was just a note, addressed to London, and evidently written in great haste to catch a delayed post-bag.
"Oh, my dear, that orange tree of ours—that you and I planted together that day—is putting out tiny blossoms! Do you suppose it is a happy omen, Jim? How I have worked with it through this dreary winter—and now to think that it is blooming!
"Your dear hands have touched it! It is a living thing which can receive my caresses and repay their tenderness by growing tall and strong and beautiful—like you. Do you wonder that I love it?
"When you come again I shall take you out to see it, and we shall walk softly up to the shelf where it stands—so carefully, to keep from jarring a single leaf—and we shall separate the branches, still very carefully, to look down at the little new stems. And, Jim—Jim—the blossoms will be like starry young eyes looking up at us! The pink, faintly-showing glow will be as delicateas a tiny cheek, when sleep has flushed it—and the petals will close over our fingers with all the clinging softness of a helpless little clutch!
"We will be very happy for a little while, but, because I am savage and resentful over our delayed joy, I shall cry on your shoulder and say it's cruel—cruel—that you and I have only this plant to love together."
After this came two or three more, like it, then I reached for one which brought a misty wetness to my eyes. The lover was gone—quite gone—and the woman had seemed to feel that they would meet no more.
... "At other times I remember all the months which have gone by since then—and the miles of dark water which roll between your land and mine. God pity the woman who has a lover across the sea!
"AmI sorry that I sent you away? You ask me this—yet how can you! How many letters I have written, bidding you, naybeggingyou to come back—how many times have I droppedthem into the post-bag in the hall—then, after an hour's thought, have run in terror and snatched them out again!
"I am trying so hard to be good! Can I hold out—just a little while longer? I am going to die young, remember, and that is the one hope which consoles me! It used to be that I shrank from the medical men who told me this—who told me with their pitying eyes and grave looks—but now I welcome their gravity. Sir Humphrey Davy has written a letter to my husband, advising him to send me off to Italy for this incoming winter—but I shall not go! 'I fear that dread phthisis in the rigor of English cold,' he writes—but for me it can not come too soon!
"... Yet all the time the knowledge haunts me that our lives are passing! I can not bear it! I spend the hours out in the garden—where the sun-dial tells me—allsilently—of the day's wearing on.
"Since you went away I can not listen to the sound of the clock in the hall. That chime—thatholy trustful chime—'O Lord, our God, be Thou our Guide,' shames the unholy prayer on my lips.
"Then the clock ticks, ticks, ticks—all day—all night—on, and on, and on—to remind me of our hearts' wearying beats! Does this thought ever come to madden you? That our hearts have only so many times to throb in this life—and when we are apart every pulsation is wasted?"
I thrust this letter back into its place—then hastily closed down the desk. The sensation of reading a thing like that is not pleasant. She had written with an awful,awfulpain in her heart—and she had lived before the days of anesthetics!
"Women don't feel things like that—now," I muttered, as I crossed the room and lowered the curtain. "They—they have too many other things to divert them, I suppose!"
I knew, however, that I was judging everybody by myself, and certainlyIhad never known an awful hurt like that.
"Why, I could listen to ataximetertick—for a whole year—while Guilford was away from me, and I don't believe it would make me nervous for a sight of him."
I was considerably disgusted with myself for my callousness as I came to this conclusion, however, and I sat down in the window, overlooking the tiny strip of rose-garden to think it out. Presently I crossed the room again to the desk.
"I'mnot going to jest at scars—even if I haven't felt a wound!" I decided, once and for always.
I opened the desk then and gathered up the letters, packet by packet, tying them into one big bundle.
"Publish these—heart-throbs!"
I was so furious that I could have gagged Uncle Lancelot if he had opened his mouth—which he didn't dare do! In this respect he and grandfather are very much like living relatives. They'll argue with you through ninety-nine years of indecision,but once you've made up your mind irrevocably they close their lips into a sullen silence—saving their breath for "I told you so!"
"I don't see how anybody could have thought of such blasphemy!" I kept on. "It would be like a vivisection! That's what people want though, nowadays—they won't have just a book! They want to be present at a clinic!—They want to see others' hearts writhe—because they have no feelings of their own!"
Then, after my thoughts had had time to get away from the past up into the present and project themselves, somewhat spitefully, into the future, I made another decision, slamming the desk lid to accentuate it.
"I shall not publish them myself—nor ever give anybody else a chance to publish them!" I declared. "By rights they are not really mine! I am just their guardian, because Aunt Patricia couldn't take them on her journey with her—and some day I shall take them on a journey with me. To Colmere Abbey—that dream-houseof mine! That's the thing to do! And burn them on the hearth in the library, where she likely burned his—if she did burn them! Of course I can't run the risk of what the next generation might do!"
This last thought tormented me as I fell asleep.
"No, I can not hand those letters down to my daughters," I decided drowsily, being in that hazy state where the mind traverses unheard-of fields—unheard-of for waking thought—and queer little twisting decisions come. "They wouldneverbe able to understand!"
I was aroused by this hypothesis into sudden wakefulness.
"Of course they could not understand—me or my feelings!" I muttered, sitting up in bed and facing the darkness defiantly. "Theycouldnot—if—ifthey were Guilford's daughters, too!"
My first waking thought the next morning had nothing on earth to do with the dilemma of the day before. I stretched my arms lazily, then a little shrinkingly, as I remembered what the daily grind would be. There was to be a Flag Day celebration of the Daughters of the American Revolution—and I was to report Major Coleman's speech. That's why I shrank. I am not a society woman.
"D. A. R.," I grumbled, jumping out of bed and going across to the window to see what kind of day we were going to have.—"D-a-r-n!"
Anyway, the day was all right, and after waving a welcome to the sun—whose devout worshiper I am—I rubbed a circle of dust off themirror and looked at myself. Every woman has distinctly pretty days—and distinctly homely ones; and usually the homely ones come to the front viciously when you're booked for something extraordinary. However, this proved to be one of my good-looking periods, and out of sheer gratitude I polished off the whole expanse of the mirror. Incidentally, I am not an absolutely dustless housekeeper, in spite of my craze for simplicity. I consider that there are only two things that need be kept passionately clean in this life—the human skin and the refrigerator.
"Are you going to dress for the fête—before you go to the office?" mother inquired rebelliously, as she saw me arranging my hair with that look of masculine expectation later on in the morning. "Why don't you get your other work off, then come back home and dress?"
"Well—because," I answered indifferently.
"But theSonsof the Revolution are going to meet with the Daughters!" she warned.
"I know that."
As if to demonstrate my possession of this knowledge I turned away from the mirror and displayed my festive charms. A light gray coat-suit had been converted into the deception of a gala garment by the addition of Irish lace; and mother, looking it over contemptuously, went into her own bedroom for a moment, and came back carrying her diamond-studded D. A. R. pin. She held it out toward me—with the air of a martyr.
"But—aren't you going to wear it yourself?" I asked, with a little feeling of awe at the lengths of mother-love. She had been regent of her chapter—and loved the organization well enough to go to Washington every year.
"No."
"Then—then do you mean to say that you're not going to Mrs. Walker's to-day?"
She shook her head.
"Why—mother!"
I turned to her and saw that a tear had dropped down upon the last golden bar bridgingthe wisp of red, white and blue. There were ten bars in all, each one engraved for an ancestor—and when I wore the thing I felt like a foreign diplomat sitting for his picture.
"What's the matter, honey?" I asked. She had always been my little girl, and I felt at times as if I were unduly severe in my discipline of her.
"Grace, you don't know how I feel!"
The words came jerkily—and I knew that I was in for it.
"Does your head ache?" I asked hastily. "You'd better get on the car and ride out into the—"
"My headdoesn'tache!" she denied stoutly. "It's my h-heart!—To see you—Grace Chalmers Christie—racing around to such things as this in a coat-suit! You ought, by right of birth and charm, be the chief ornament of such affairs as this—the chief ornament, I say—yet you go carrying a'hunk o' copy paper!'"
"In my bag," I modified.
"And you get up and leave places before you get a bite of food—and race back to that office, like a wild thing, to'turn it in!'"
This contemptuous use of my own jargon caused me to laugh.
"And do you think that the wearing of this heavy pin will prove so exhausting that I'll have to stay at Mrs. Walker's to-day for a bite of food?" I asked.
She looked at me in helpless reproach.
"I want you to go to this thing as a D. A. R.," she explained, "not as aHeraldreporter."
"Then I'll wear it," I promised, kissing her soothingly. "But you must go, too."
She shook her head again.
"I can't—I really can't!" she said. "I've got nothing fine enough to wear. This is going to be a magnificent thing, every one tells me—with all the local Sons—and this wonderful Major Coleman to lecture on flags."
She looked at me suspiciously as she uttered her plaint about the Sons being present, and inanswer, I thrust forward one gray suede pump.
"But I'm ready for any Son on earth—Oldburgh earth," I protested. "Don't youseemy exquisite lace collar—and the pink satin rose in my chapeau—and this silken and buskskin footgear? Surely no true Son would ever pause to suspect the 'hunk o' copy paper' which lieth beneath all this glory!"
"Isn't Guilford going with you?" she called after me as I left the house a few minutes later. "Will he meet you at the office?"
"No—thank heaven—it's an awful thing to have to listen to two men talk at the same time—especially when you're taking one down in shorthand—and Guilford is mercifully busy this afternoon."
I had a bunch of pink roses, gathered fresh that morning from our strip of garden, and I stopped in the office of the owner and publisher when I had reached theHeraldbuilding. Just because he's old, and drank out of the same canteen with my grandfather I made a habit ofkeeping fresh flowers in his gray Rookwood vase. This spot of color, together with the occasional twinkle from his eyes, made the only break in the dusty newspapery monotony of the room. He looked up from his desk, and his face brightened as he saw my holiday attire.
"Well, Grace?"
He started up, big and shaggy—and wistful—like a St. Bernard. I like old men to look like St. Bernards—and young ones to look like greyhounds.
"Don't get up—nor clear off a chair for me," I warned, catching up the vase and starting toward the water-cooler. "I can't stay a minute."
He collapsed into his squeaky revolving chair. When he was a lad a Yankee minnie ball had implanted a kiss upon his left shoulder-blade, and he still carried that side with a jaunty little hike—a most flirtatious little hike, which, however, caused the distinguished rest of him to appear unduly severe.
"Ah! But you must explain the 'dolled-up' aspect," he begged.
I laughed at the schoolgirl slang.
"Why, this is Flag Day!" I told him. "How can you have forgotten?—There will be a gigantic celebration at Mrs. Hiram Walker's—and all the pedigreed world will be there."
He smiled—slowly.
"And you're writing it up?"
"Just Major Coleman's lecture! They say he is quite the most learned man in the world on the subject of flags. He knows them and loves them. He carries them about with him on these lecture tours in felt-lined steel cases."
"Cases?" he smiled.
"Certainly," I answered. "Whatever a man esteems most precious—or useful—he has cases for! The commercial man has his sample cases—the medical man his instrument cases—the artistic man, his—"
"Divorce cases," he interrupted dryly.
"Alas, yes!" I sighed, my thoughts traveling back.
He wheeled slowly, giving me a glance which finally tapered off with the pink rosebuds in my hands.
"Then," he asked kindly, "if you're going to a very great affair this afternoon, why don't you keep these flowers and wear them yourself?"
I shook my head.
"But I'm a newspaper woman!" I said with dignity. "I might as well wear a vanity-bag as to wear flowers."
"Bosh! You're not a newspaper woman, Grace," he denied, still looking at me half sadly. "And yet—well, sometimes it is—just such women as you who do the amazing things."
"Mother thinks so, certainly!" I laughed. "But you meant in what way, for instance?"
He hesitated, studying me for a moment, while I held still and let him, for there's always a satisfaction in being studied when there's a satin rose in your hat.
"Oh—nothing," he finally answered, with a look of regret upon his face.
"But it is something!" I persisted, "and, even if I am in a big hurry, I shan't budge until you tell me!"
"Well, since you insist—I only meant to say that I'd been doing a little thinking on my own account lately—as owner and publisher of this paper, with its interests at heart—and I've wondered just how much a woman might accomplish, after a man had failed."
"A woman?"
"By the ill use of her eyes, I mean," he confessed, his own eyes twinkling a little. "Women can gain by the ill use of their eyes what men fail to accomplish by their straightforward methods."
"But that's what men hate so in women!" I said.
He nodded.
"Ye-es—maybe! That is, they make a great pretense of hating a woman when she uses hereyes to any end save one—charming them for their own dear sakes!"
"They naturally grudge her the spoils she gains by the ill use of those important members," I answered defensively.
"Oh," he put in quickly, "I wasn't going to suggest that you do any such thing—unless you wanted to! I was merely thinking—that was all!"
"And besides," I kept on, "all the men who have ever done anything worth being interviewed for—nearly all of them, I mean—are so old that—"
He interrupted me wrathfully.
"Old men are not necessarily blind men, Miss Christie," he explained. "But we'll change the subject, if you please!"
"Anyway, it doesn't happen once in twenty years that a newspaper woman gets a scoop just because she's a woman," I continued, not being ready just then to change the subject even if he had demanded it.
"It does," he contradicted. "It's one of the most popular plots for magazine stories."
"Bah! Magazine stories and life are two different propositions, my dear Captain Macauley!" I explained with a blasé air. "I should like some better precedent before I started out on an assignment."
"Yet you are a most unprecedented young woman," he replied in a meaning tone. "I've suspected it before—but recent reports confirm my worst imaginings."
I glanced at him searchingly.
"You've been talking with mother?" I ventured.
For a moment he was inscrutable.
"Oh, I know you have!" I insisted. "She's told it to everybody who will listen."
"The story of the Coburn-Colt that wasn't hatched?"
His face was severe, but the little upward twist of his left shoulder was twitching as if with suppressed emotion.
"She told you with tears in her eyes, I know," I kept on. "All the old friends get the tearful accompaniment."
"Well, miss, doesn't that make you all the more ashamed of your foolishness?" he demanded.
"My foolishness?"
Something seemed to give way under me as he said this, for he was always on my side, and I had never found sympathy lacking before.
"I mean that—that Don Quixote carried to an extreme becomes Happy Hooligan," he pronounced.
I drew back in amazement.
"Why, Captain Horace Macauley—of Company A—18th Kentucky Infantry!"
He tried hard not to smile.
"You needn't go so far back—stay in the present century, if you please."
"But ever since then—even to this good day and in a newspaper office, where the atmosphere is so cold-blooded that a mosquito couldn't flyaround without getting a congestive chill, you know your reputation! Why, you could give the Don horse spurs and armor, then arrive a full week ahead of him at a windmill!"
"Tommy-rot."
"Supererogation is a prettier word," I amended, but he shook his head.
"No! Six syllables are like six figures-they get you dizzy when you commence fooling with them! Besides, I was discussingyourright to commit foolish acts of self-sacrificing, Grace, not mine."
"But it didn't seem foolish to me," I tried to explain.
"When you're working in this rotten newspaper office, where no woman could possibly feel at home, for the vigorous sum of seventy-five dollars a month?—Then it doesn't seem idiotic?"
"No!"
"And your mother moping and pining for the things she ought to have?"
"No-o—not much!"
"And Guilford Blake standing by, waiting like a gentleman for this fever of emancipation to pass by and desquamation to take place?"
This interested me.
"What's 'desquamation?'" I asked. "I haven't time to get my dictionary now."
"You couldn't find it in any save a medical dictionary, likely," he explained, with a pretense at patience. "Anyway, it's the peeling off process which follows a high fever—especially such fevers as you girls of this restless, modern temperament so often experience!"
I shivered.
"Ugh! It doesn't sound pretty!" I commented.
"Nor is it pretty," he assured me, "but it's very wholesome. Once you've caught the fever, lived through it, peeled off and got a shiny new skin you're forever immune against its return. This, of course, is what Guilford is waiting so patiently for. He is one of the most estimable young fellows I know, Grace, and—"
I looked wounded.
"Don't you suppose I know that?" I asked. Then glancing quickly at the watch bracelet on my wrist, and seeing with a gasp of relief that the hands were pointing toward the dangerous hour of three, I turned toward the door.
"I must hurry!" I plead. "You've really no idea what an interesting occasion a Flag Day celebration is, Captain Macauley!"
"No?" he smiled, understanding my sudden determination to leave.
"Indeed, no! Why, for three hundred and sixty-four days in the year you may have a gentle Platonic affection for General Washington, Paul Revere and the rest, but on the other day—Flag Day—your flame is rekindled into a burning zeal! You can't afford to be late! You must hurry!—Especially if you have to go there on the street-car!"
"It's a deuced pity you can't get up a zeal for a devotedlivingman," he called after me in a severe voice as I reached the door. "It's a pityyou can't see the idiocy of this determination of yours—before that publishing company revokes its offer."
"Well, who knows?" I answered, waving him a gay good-by. "I hate street-cars above everything, and I'm sorry my coupé isn't waiting at the door right now!"
Now, according to my ethics, there are two kinds of men who go to daylight parties—idiots and those that are dragged there by their wives.
I had scarcely crossed the lawn of Seven Oaks and found for myself a modest place beside the speaker's stand—which was garlanded with as many different kinds of flags as there were rats in Hamelin Town—when I observed that this present congregation held a fair sprinkling of each kind.
But these held my attention for only a moment—because of the house in the background, and the trees overhead. (To be candid, Mrs. Hiram Walker's country place is not exactly asoothing retreat to visit when temptation is barking at your heels like a little hungry dog—and the desire of your heart begins with H.)
"House that's a Home" might have been written on the sign-board of the car-station much more truthfully than "Seven Oaks"—for only the immense patriarchal ones were included in the "Seven" there being hordes of lesser ones which were no more mentioned than children are when they're getting big enough to be paying railroad fare. The grove was well cared for, but not made artificial, and even the luxuriousness of the house itself could not hurt the charm, for the Hiram Walkers were human beings before they were society column acrobats.
Our families had always been friends, so I happened to know that years and years ago, when Mr. Walker was a clerk in an insurance office—with a horse and buggy for business through the week and joy unconfined on Sunday—they had been in the habit of haunting this spot, he and his slim young wife—bringing abasket full of supper and thrusting the baby's milk bottle down into the ice-cream freezer. Then, there were more years, of longing and saving; they bought the hill, patiently enduring a period of blue-prints and architectural advice before the house was built. By this time Mrs. Walker's slimness was gone, and Mr. Walker had found out the vanity of hair tonics—but the house was theirs at last. It was big and very beautiful—roomy, rather than mushroomy—and thoughtful, rambling, old-timey, spreading out a great deal of portico to the kiss of the sun. Brown-hooded monks and clanking beads ought, by rights, to have gone with that portico.
Then, the June sunshine was doing such wonders with the oaks, great and small, along the hillsides!
It touched up, with a tinge of glory, even the shining motor-cars in the driveway. There were dozens of them—limousines, touring cars, lady-like coupés—with their lazy, half-asleep attendants, and the regularity of their unbroken files,their dignity, their quietness, and the glitter of the sun against their metal gave them something of a martial aspect. The silver sheen of the lamps and levers was brought out in a manner to suggest a line of marching men, silent, but very potent—and enjoying more than a little what they offered to view, the dazzle of helmet, sword and coat-of-mail.
The beauty of it all—the softened glory of the shade in which I sat making me feel that I was a spectator at a tournament—cast a spell over me, for I never find it very hard to fall spellbound. Isn't it funny that when you're possessed of an intelligence which has fits of St. Vitus' dance they call it Imagination?—That's the kind mine is—jerky and unreliable. It is the kind of imagination which can take a dried-up acorn and draw forth a medieval forest; or gaze upon a rusty old spur and live over again the time when knights were bold.
But to get back to "those present."
First of all, I noted Oldburgh's best-knownremittance man. I noted him mentally, mind you, not paragraphically, for they never made me do the real drudgery of the society page. He was sitting beside his mama, swinging her gauze fan annoyingly against her lorgnette chain. His divorce the year before had come near uniting Church and State, since it's a fact that nothing so cements conflicting bodies like the uprising of a new common foe; and he had sinned against both impartially. After him came two or three financial graybeards; three or four yearling bridegrooms, not broken yet to taking the bit between their teeth and staying rebelliously at the office; a habitual "welcomer to our city"—Major Harvey Coleman, a high officer in the Sons of the American Revolution, and the pièce de résistence of this occasion—then—then—!
Well, certainly the impassive being next him was the most unsocial-looking man I had ever had my eyes droop beneath the gaze of!
He was sitting in the place of honor—in the last chair of the first row—but despite this, he soclearly did not belong at that party, and he so clearly wished himself away that I—well, I instantly began searching through the crowds to find a woman with handcuffs! I felt sure that, whoever she might be—she hadn't got him there any other way!
And yet—and yet—(my thoughts were coming in little dashing jerks like that) hewasrather too big for any one woman to have handled him!
I decided this after another look and another droop of my own eyes, for he was still looking—and that was what I decided about him first—that he was verybig! Then misbehaving brown hair came next into my consciousness. It came to top off a picture which for a moment caused me to wonder whether he was really a flesh-and-blood man at Mrs. Walker's reception, or the spirit of some woodsman—come again, after many years, to haunt the grove of the Seven Oaks.
His New York clothes didn't make a bit ofdifference—except to spoil the illusion a little. They were all light gray, except for a glimpse of blue silk hose, and their perfection only served to remind you that it was a pity for a man who looked likethatto dress likethat!
Modern man has but one artistic garment—a bathrobe; yet it wouldn't have relieved my feelings any if this man had been dressed in one. For he wasn't artistic—and certainly he wasn't modern!
Still, I felt the pity of it all, for he ought to have had better perceptions. He ought to have had his clothes and cosmic consciousness match! He ought to have been dressed in a coat of goatskin—and his knees ought to have been bare—and the rawhide thongs of his moccasins ought to have been strong and firm!
I had just reached this point in my plans for the change in his wardrobe, when our hostess bustled up and shooed me out of my quiet corner.
"Grace," she whispered, "move out a bit, will you, and let me crowd a man in over there—"
"In here?"
She nodded.
"Where he can'tescape!" she explained.
I gathered up my opened sheet of copy paper and moved obediently into the next chair, which she had indicated.
"That's right—thank you! I've found out by experience that if you let certain suspicious characters linger on the ragged edges of a crowd like this they're sure to disappear."
Then she turned and beckoned to my Fifth-Avenue-looking backwoodsman—with a smile of triumph.
"Him?" I asked in surprise.
She was looking in his direction, so failed to see the expression of my face.
"It's no more than he deserves—having this American Revolution rubbed in on him," she observed absently. "I have never worked so hard in my life over any one man as I have over this identical Maitland Tait!"
I saw him rise and come toward her—then Ibegan having trouble with my throat. I couldn't breathe very easily.
"Maitland Tait!" I gasped.
"Yes—theMaitland Tait!"
Her voice sounded with a brass-band echo of victory.
"But how did you—"
"By outwitting Pollie Kendall—plague take her!"
The man was coming leisurely, stopping once to speak to one of the graybeard financiers.
"Have you met him?" Mrs. Walker asked carelessly, as he approached.
"No."
She turned to him.
"I'm going to put you in here—where you'll have to stay," she laughed, her big, heavy frame looking dwarfed beside his own towering height.
"I wasn't going to run away."
"No? You can't always tell—and I thought it safe to take every precaution, for this lecturemay be long, and it's certain to be irritating to one of your nationality.—In this location you'll be in the clutches of the Press, you see, and—by the way, you must meet Miss Christie!—Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"
His face was still perfectly impassive, and he bowed gravely—with that down-to-the-belt grace which foreigners have. I nodded the pink satin rose on my hat in his direction. This was all! Neither made any further demonstration than that!—And to think that since Creation's dawn—the world over—the thing is done just as idly and carelessly as that! "Mr. Tait, Miss Christie!"—These are the words which were said—and, dear me, all the days of one's life ought to be spent in preparation for the event!
"You are a Daughter of the Revolution, I presume?" his voice finally asked me—a deep clear voice, which was strong enough to drown out the Wagnerian processionals beating at that moment against my brain, and to follow me off on the mother-of-pearl cloud I had embarked upon.It was a glorious voice, distinctly un-American, but with the suggestion of having the ability to do linguistic contortions. He looked like a man who had traveled far—over seas and deserts—and his voice confirmed it. It proclaimed that he could bargain with equal ease in piasters and pence. Still, it was a big wholesome voice. It matched the coat of goatskin, the bare knees and the moccasins I had planned for him.
"Yes, I am," I answered.
Our eyes met for an instant, as he disengaged his gaze from that ten-barred insignia on my coat. Far, far back, concealed by his dark iris, was a tinge of amused contempt.
"Then I dare say you're interested in this occasion?" he inquired. I shouldn't say that he inquired, for he didn't. His tone held a challenge.
"No, indeed, I'm not!" I answered foolishly. "I came only because I have to write up Major Coleman's speech for my paper. I am a special writer for theHerald."
And it was then that he smiled—really smiled. I saw a transformation which I had never seen in any other man's face, for with him a smile escapes! There is a breaking up of the ruggedness, an eclipse of the stern gravity for a moment, and—no matter how much you had cared for these an instant before—you could not miss them then—not in that twinkling flood of radiance!
"Oh—so you're not an ancestor-worshiper?"
"No."
"But I thought Americans were!" he insisted.
"Americans?" I repeated loftily. "Why, of course, that's an English—religion."
"Not always," he answered grimly, and the Italian band stationed behind the clump of boxwood cut short any further conversation.
I was glad, for I did not want to talk to him then. I merely wanted to stand off—and look at him—and tell myself what manner of man he must be.
To do this I glanced down at my copy paper,with one eyelid raised in favor of his profile. An ancestor-worshiper? Absurd! Ancestors were quite out of the question with him, I felt sure. There was something gloriouslytraditionlessabout his face and expansive frame. But his hands? Those infallible records of what has gone before?—I dropped my eyes to their normal position. His hands weregood! They were big and long and brown—that shade of brownness that comes to a meerschaum pipe after it has been kissed a time or two by nicotine. And his hair was brown, too light by several shades to match with his very dark eyes, but it likely looked lighter on account of its conduct, standing up, and away, and back from his face. His complexion spoke of an early-to-bed and early-to-tub code of ethics. His nose and mouth were well in the foreground.
"You are a man who cares nothing at all for your ancestors—but you'll care a great deal for your descendants!" was the summing up I finally made of him.
At the close of the band's Hungarian Rhapsody he leaned over and whispered to me.
"Did you say theHerald?" he asked.
"Yes."
"I have had my—attention called to your paper recently," he said, in so serious a tone that I was compelled to look up and search for the smile which I felt must lurk behind it. And when I saw it there I felt reassured, and smiled in response.
"So they told me at the office," I said with great cordiality. "Is it three or four of our reporters you've thrown down your front steps?"
"Oh, I haven't got close enough to them to throw them down the steps," he disclaimed quickly. "That's one thing you have to guard against with reporters. They've got you—if they once see the whites of your eyes!"
I felt it my duty to bristle, in defense of my kind.
"Not unless your eyestalk," I said. Then, when he stared at me in uncertainty for a moment,I dropped my own eyes again, for I felt that they were proclaiming their convictions as loudly as a Hyde Park suffragette meeting.
The band at that moment struck upThe Star-Spangled Bannerin a manner to suggest the president's advent into the theater, and I searched in my bag for my pencil. I had seen the lecturer cough.
"I say—how long is this convocation supposed to last?" Maitland Tait inquired in a very inconspicuous whisper, as the white-flanneled lion of the affair arose from his chair and became the cynosure of lorgnettes.
"Well, this talk will absorb about forty-five minutes, I should hazard," I said. Already I had had the forethought to jot down the usual opening: "Ladies and Gentlemen—Daughters and Sons of the American Revolution: It is with a feeling of profoundest pleasure that I have the privilege of being with you to-day," etc. So for the moment my attention was undivided.
"And there will be other talks?"
"Yes."
"And a walk through the gardens, I believe Mrs.—Mrs. Walker said?"
"Probably so. The Seven Oaks gardens are very lovely in June."
At the mention of gardens his eyes wandered, with what I fancied was a tinge of homesickness, toward the colorful flowering spaces beyond the box hedges. There were acres and acres of typical English gardens back there; and the odor of the sweet old-fashioned shrubs came in on gentle heat waves from the open area. He looked as if he would like to be back there in those English-looking gardens—with all the people gone.
"And are you going to write up the whole thing?" he inquired, during a little commotion caused by one of the large flags slipping from its stand and threatening to obscure the speaker.
"You mean make a society column report of it?"
"Yes."
"No. I'm a sort of special feature writer on theHerald, and I am to get only this speech of Major Coleman's to put in my Sunday page."
The lecture had commenced in good earnest by this time, and I was scribbling away in shorthand as I talked.
"Not one among us is insensible to the visions of patriotic pride and affection which the veryname of 'Old Glory' conjures up within us, but at the same time we may do well to review, quite dispassionately, once in a while the wonderful chain of historical changes which came about in evolving this flag to its present form.... For we all realize that there is no perfect thing in this world which has not been an evolution from some imperfect thing.... When Pope Gregory, the"—Somethingth, I quite failed to catch his number—"granted to Scotland the white cross of St. Andrew, and to England the red cross of St. George, he faintly surmised what a tempest in a teapot he was stirring up!"
He paused, and the man at my side got in a word, edgewise.
"All of it?" he asked, looking aghast at the pages of long-tailed dots and dashes under my hand. I laughed.
"I'm paid to do it," I answered. "I don't disfigure my handwriting this way for nothing."
"But—but—you must be very clever," he commented, so appalled at the thought that he forgothe was talking to a stranger. I like that faculty. I like a man who dares to be awkwardly sincere.
"Not clever—only very needy," I replied, turning over the page as I saw the lecturer replace the white flag of St. Andrew into its stand and take up the thread of his talk. "And I don't know that I need get every word of the discourse. The women who read my page don't care a rap about flags—but they do care to see a picture of Major Coleman and his wife and their dog on the piazza of their winter home, just out from Tampa!—I've got to have enough of this lecture to carry that picture."
He nodded gravely.
"I see. But after you get this report?"
"I'm going back to the city," I answered. "I have to catch the five o'clock car in."
"... The jealousy became so fierce between the two nations—the absurd jealousy over which should first salute the flag of the other—St. George claiming great superiority in the way of godliness over St. Andrew, and St. Andrew,with the true Scotch spirit, stiffening his neck to the breaking point, while waiting for St. George to take off his hat to him, that when the story of this dissension reached the ears of Pope Gregory, he—"
I never knew what he did until afterward, for at that moment I saw Maitland Tait slip his watch out carefully, guarding the action with an outspread left hand.
"I've an engagement at five, too," he said.
"... He determined to lose no time," was the next sentence I found myself jotting down on paper, and wondering whether Major Coleman had really said such a thing or whether it had been born in my mind of the stress of the moment.... "He was a man of the most impulsive, sometimes of the most erratic, actions."
"Of course!" my heart said between thumps. "I shouldn't like him if he were not."
"I can make my excuses to Mrs. Walker atthe same time you make yours," the deep voice said, in a surprisingly soft tone.
"... For he saw in such a course protection and peace," Major Coleman announced. "All the world suspected that his ultimate aim was union, but—"
"An international alliance," my heart explained, as I jotted down the words of the lecturer.
"Mayn't I take you back to town in my car?"
"... And all the world knew that he was a man absolutely untrammeled by tradition," the white-flanneled one proclaimed.
"Thank you, that would be lovely, but I'm afraid Mrs. Walker won't consent to your going so soon," I said between curlicues.
"I'm going, however," he answered. "I've an important engagement, and—I'm not going to stay at this—this," he closed his lips firmly, but the silence said "cussed," that dear, fierce, American adjective. "I'm not going to stay at this partyone minute after you're gone. I don't like to talk to just any woman."
"... Yet I would have you understand that he was a temperamental man," was thundered in a warning tone from the speaker's stand. "He was quick in judgment and action, but he was fine and sensitive in spirit. I've never a doubt that he disliked and feared the occasion which caused this precipitate action. He was quaking in his boots all the time, but he was courageous. He decided to make brief work of formalities and take a short cut to his heart's desire."
"What was it he did?" I asked of Mr. Tait, startled at the thought of what I'd missed. "Do you know what this thing was that Pope Gregory did?"
"No-o—listen a minute!" he suggested.
"... Can't you just imagine now that he was afraid of what people might say—or do?" asked the major encouragingly. "It was absolutely unprecedented in the annals of history—sucha quick, rash and sudden decision. If England and Scotland were going to be eternally bickering over their flags, they should haveoneflag! They should be united! They should—"
"TheUnion Jack!" whispered the deep voice close at my side, while the grave dark eyes lighted, as—as they should have lighted, or I'd never have forgiven him. "He created the Union Jack, by George!"
And the speaker on the stand demonstrated the truth of this conclusion by displaying a big British flag, which caught in its socket as he attempted to lift it and occasioned another pause in the speech.
"This enthusiasm makes me hungry," Maitland Tait observed, as the audience courteously saluted the ancient emblem of hostility, and the echoes of applause died away. "Since we're going to get no tea here, can't we drive by some place up-town? There's a good-looking place in Union Street—"
"But that would make you very late for your engagement, I'm afraid," I demurred. "It will take some little time to drive in."
He looked at me wonderingly for a moment.
"My engagement? Oh, yes—but it can wait."
"Then, if it can, I'm afraid Mrs. Walker will not let you off. I happen to know that—"
He cut short my argument by motioning me to pay attention to the speaker, who at the moment had replaced the flag of Pope Gregory's cunning, and was talking away at a great rate.
"... Yet, who can say that the hastiest actions do not often bring about the best results? Certainly when a decision is made out of an excessive desire to bring happiness to all parties concerned, its immediate action can not fail to denote a wholesome heartiness which should always be emulated.... Different from most men of his native country, possessing a genuinely warm heart, a subtle mentality, coupled with a conscience which impelled him always toward the right, he was enabled, by this one impetuousact, to become a benefactor of mankind! What he longed for was harmony—a harmonious union; and what he has achieved has been the direct outcome of a great longing. He created a union—wholesome, strengthening and permanent," I took down in shorthand.
I have a confused impression—I suppose I should say post-impression, for I didn't remember anything very clearly until afterward—that Betsy Ross, Pope Gregory, the Somethingth, and Mrs. Hiram Walker were all combining to tie my hands and feet together with thongs of red, white and blue.
It seemed hours and hours before that lecture ended, then more hours before the tall restless man and I could make our way through a sea of massaged faces to a distant point where our hostess stood giving directions to a white-coated servant.
She turned to me, with a fluttering little air of regret, when I reached her side.
"Grace, surely you don't have to hurry off at this unchristian hour!" she insisted. "My dear, you really should stay! Solinski has arranged the loveliest spread, and I'm not going to keep the company waiting forever to get to it, either!—The ices will be the surprise of the season."
"I'm sorry," I began, but she interrupted me.
"Whydidn'tyour mother come?"
Already her vague regret over my own hasty departure had melted away, and as she saw the tall man following me, evidently bent upon the same mission as mine, she put her query in a perfunctory way to hide her chagrin.
"Mother couldn't come, Mrs. Walker. There is only one D. A. R. pin in the family, as you know—and I had to wear that."
Maitland Tait, looking over my shoulder, heard my explanation and smiled.
"It is a great deprivation to miss the rest of your charming party, Mrs. Walker," he began, but as he mentioned going, in a cool final voice, our hostess emitted a little terrified shriek.
"What? Not you, too!"
His face was the picture of deep contrition.
"Iamsorry," he said, as only an Englishman can say it, and it always sounds as if he were digging regret up out of his heart with a shovel, "but I have an important engagement that really can not wait—"
"And the General Seth O'Callen Chapter fairly holding its breath to meet you!" she wailed, the despair in her voice so genuine that it was impossible to keep back a smile. "That is our chapter composed entirely ofyoungwomen, you know, and I'd given their regent my word of honor that you'd be here to-day!"
"Which the Regent has entirely forgotten in the charm of that delightful lecture we've just heard, I'm sure," he answered, his tones regretfully mollifying. "If it were at all possible for me to get word to the man—the men—"
The rest of the fabrication was cut short and drowned out by the shriek of a trolley-car, grinding noisily round a curve of the track at that instant.It was the five-o'clock car, and I had grown to watch for its shriek as fearfully as ever Cinderella listened for the stroke of twelve from the castle clock. For me there was never a garden party without its trolley-car back to the city—its hateful, five-o'clock car—its hurried, businesslike, hungry summons—while ice in tea glasses tinkled to the echo.
From force of long habit now that grinding sound of the car-wheels acted upon my nervous system like a fire alarm upon an engine horse—and I started to run.
"Charming party—so sorry to have to rush off this way—hope next time I'll not be so busy—yes, I'll tell mother!"
I gathered the folds of copy paper close, having forgotten to thrust them away out of sight into my bag, and made a break for the front gate. Then, as I reached the line of waiting motor-cars, I remembered—and stopped still with a foolish little feeling.
Looking back I saw Mrs. Walker shakinghands in an injured fashion with her troublesome lion—who, after the manner of lions, proved that he could afford anxiety as well after being caught as before,—and turning her back resolutely upon his departing glory.—The whole of the General Seth O'Callen Chapter was before her, I knew she was thinking bitterly.